Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“Autism is a fundamentally different way of being, and a fundamentally useful way of being.”

Keep Clear: My Adventures with Asperger's by Tom Cutler

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I have mixed feelings about this one. There were some good points in here and it shows how positive a diagnosis can be — once Tom realizes what the cause of his life-long struggles is, his depression evaporates and he is able to start taking concrete steps to cope with things. This is a combination autobiography and a series of pocket biographies of famous people he thinks were Autistic. The autobiography bits were the best part, and I found myself getting increasingly agitated every time […]

“I’m finally in the sunshine:” A Good Look At Escaping an Abusive Mother

My Mother, Munchausen's and Me by Helen Naylor

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This is a very sad but ultimately triumphant memoir that deals with the impact of Munchausen’s on both the author’s mother, the author herself, and their family and friends more widely. Helen Naylor’s mother had Munchausen’s Syndrome (also called Factitious Disorder), and over the course of this memoir we see Helen slowly realize that her mother has been lying about her illnesses and abusing her. During Helen’s childhood, her mother says she has ME/CFS and spends most of her time resting and leaving Helen to […]

A graphic novel memoir about a ten growing up between cultures

It Won't Always Be Like This by Malaka Gharib

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I’m not a big fan of reading memoirs – unless they’re graphic novels. There’s something about the combination of words and illustrations that makes me feel like I’m getting a better insight into the person. So when I saw this coming-of-age memoir by an Filipina-Egyptian-American woman, I was intensely curious about how she balanced all those identities. I didn’t realize when I picked this up but it’s the second in the series. It worked just fine as a standalone, though. The book starts with Malaka at […]

Great art tells the truth and that can be dangerous

The Genius Under the Table: Growing Up Behind the Iron Curtain by Eugene Yelchin

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Over the summer BlackRaven reviewed this book and I immediately recognized the name of the author. Eugene Yelchin illustrated/co-wrote one of my favorite books, The Assassination of Brangwain Spurge, and BlackRaven’s review made The Genius Under the Table sound too good to pass up. And indeed it is! Eugene Yelchin was born and raised in the Soviet Union, and The Genius Under the Table is a memoir of his childhood in Leningrad, a childhood marked by secrets and repression. Yelchin was born in the mid-1950s, […]

A Well Written Family Memoir That Didn’t Click For Me

She Left Me the Gun: My Mother's Life Before Me by Emma Brockers

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CBRBingo14: Shadow (the family history is a shadow over the writer’s life) Sometimes you read a very well reviewed, technically well written, and well researched book and find the narrator annoying, and that’s what happened here for me. She Left Me the Gun is a memoir about Brockes researching her mother’s life after her death from cancer. Through her research, she finds out the truth about her grandfather’s abuse of his children, and she connects with her family in South Africa. This book is very […]

“I feel my sexiness is a thing that creeps up on you, like mold on a loaf of corner-store bread you thought you’d get three more days out of.”

We Are Never Meeting in Real Life. by Samantha Irby

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I enjoyed We Are Never Meeting in Real Life. while listening to it, but it’s been a couple of months since I finished it now, and it hasn’t really stuck with me, so I’m rating this one three stars. The only story that I remember with any clarity was the one about her cat, which I was always going to remember because it was about a cat, but also because her cat was SOMETHING ELSE. And also because the way she writes about her cat was very […]



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